Approximately correct — Java Software Engineering Weekly Newsletter

Hello everyone!

Failed #SquadGoals: Spotify Doesn’t Use “the Spotify Model” and Neither Should You - Learn and experiment with various processes and methodologies, but always match it to the people you have and the culture you nurtured. Watch out from Process Theater - forcing everyone to play a game they don't want to that sounds great on paper yet counter-productive to your needs.

Approximately correct - Joseph Jude wrote one of my favorite blog posts this week: "Life is a dance of the probabilities. If you wait for certainties, you will lose opportunities; instead, aspire to be approximately correct. You'll enjoy building the life of your dreams. I mostly do." -- I also loved reading Joseph's principles, so give it a few more minutes and see if it inspires you to write your own. I wrote mine a couple of years ago, and it helped me think more deeply into the type of interactions, relationships, and work I want to do.

Manager's Playbook: Heuristics for Effective Management - Kamil Sindi with impressive takeaways and resources on management. I highly recommend you to skim it and dive deeper where you feel like now.

👉 STOP!! You don’t need Microservices. 👈

Java

1. Spring Tips: Configuration - Handy tips from the experts on getting the most out of Spring's Environment abstraction through application.properties.
2. An introductory guide to annotations and annotation processors - A good write-up that aims to lift the shroud of mystery surrounding Java annotations.
3. Thread Local Randoms in Java - An exercise in implementing a highly-performant, thread-safe random number generator.

Engineering

1. Package by Feature - A popular approach is packaging by technical concerns. But this approach has some drawbacks. Instead, we can package by feature and create self-contained and independent packages. The result is a codebase that is easier to understand and less error-prone.
2. Easily run CLI commands as an AWS role with AWSudo - AWSudo is a simple tool to transparently assume a role and run a command

Databased

1. You Can Now Do Serverless Streaming ETL with AWS Glue — If you want to analyze data on the fly as it arrives, you can now use AWS Glue (AWS’s ETL service) with streaming platforms like Kinesis Data Streams or Kafka which opens up a lot of opportunities as demonstrated here.
2. PostgreSQL Gets a Parallel Processing Boost — Swarm64 started life as a FPGA-driven way to accelerate Postgres’s performance for analytics and data warehouse tasks, but can now work without FPGAs too.
3. MongoDB Makes Its Compass GUI Free — Compass provides a powerful interface to work with MongoDB databases. It’s source was made publicly available last year as well.
4. Pantry: Free Cloud-Based Storage for JSON Data — Provides “perishable”, though secure, data storage for small projects via a RESTful API. Data is erased after a period of inactivity. There are quite a few projects like this and while they don’t suit long term production use, they can come in handy for hackathons, quick personal projects, teaching, etc.
5. PostgreSQL Connection Pooling: Part 3 – Pgpool-II - In this article, look at part three of PostgreSQL connection pooling.
6. PostgreSQL: Modern, Capable, Scalable, Extensible, and Fun - In this article, learn more about PostgreSQL, including details about licensing, installation, and more.

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